Family Wreath

John Sparks is a writer, historian, former preacher, and healthcare worker living at Hagerhill, Kentucky. Family Wreath is a collection of short stories on Appalachian life, told from the perspective of a medical worker, a fictional character named Tom Harmon. The "Family Wreath" is the eastern Kentucky equivalent of the pedigree or family tree, the bloodlines of a community settled for so long by two or three families that everybody is related to everybody else, often half a dozen different ways. Everyone in a Family Wreath is involved, justified or not, in everyone else's business, but conversely, the folds of the Wreath are great places to hide things that nobody wants to talk about.